Point number one.  This was the best I could do, and it's not even what I wanted:

So it's three times more than the parts I bought and not what I wanted.  Hmmm.  I didn't want an operating system, which is not a choice, not obvious anyway.  And I had to pay 99 bucks to "upgrade" to XP which is bullshit; Lenovo and all the other bastards are no different on that point.  The jump from the half gig ram to 4 gigs ram was HUGE which is ridiculous, RAM ain't that expensive. 

The biggest reason I don't do DELL? That's no fun.  As much as I like to complain, I feel really good after putting in time building a machine.  I'm not a hardware guru, so it's that sense of accomplishment that I like feel after the machine is up and running.  No adware bullshit is installed on my machine(my thinkpad had quite a bit of crapware installed which was annoying).

Continuing my day of rants...

OMG I can't even test this post in IE because scripting is disabled or some other stupid shit. Fine. I'll wrap an anchor tag around the thumbnail.

And when I say consistent, I'm referring to CONSISTENTLY SHITTY.

I realize that every other minute, IE gets blasted for being bad at this or bad at that or whatever.  But why is it, that when you do a fresh install of windows, and try to use IE, it's nothing but warning popups. phishing alerts, etc, just by surfing to naughty sites like... downloads.microsoft.com??

Do you want to add downloads.microsoft.com to your list of trusted sites?  No you piece of shit, I want to GO THERE.  In my browser.  Watch closely IE:  Open Firefox, type in a url, and .... wait for it.... wait for it.... KABLAM, the page renders without any questions. 

Today is not my day.

I got too excited about the prospect of instlling shiny 64 bit Ubuntu 8.04, with VirtualBox and/or VMWare.  My old machine was a 64 bit AMD dual core.  Pretty beefy for it's time, supplanted only by higher clock speed.  Anywho, I just realized that I only have an extra AGP card, a good one, but AGP none the less and of course my old AMD board is all about PCI-e.  The cash flow must stop until I get paid again, then what you ask? Yup, new video card!!!!  Maybe this one? GDDR4 sounds soooo naughty :)

It started off as a good idea.  I wanted to see if I could set up vmware on linux.  So I thought to myself, well  my old motherboard, cpu and ram is ready to go, why not rebuild the linux machine?  Well, it was all good until I realized that of all the power supplies I have left, and that's a total of four, are not equipped with 24-pin power connectors which my old motherboard requires.  So go to the local geek shop, and ask for a power supply, and then I saw a shiny new case.  It came with a power supply so I figured it was a good buy. 

Long boring story short, I pulled the parts out of the new rig, so they could go in the shiny new box.  Anywho, it seemed like all of the holes for the hardrives where they attach to the case were just smidge off.  So I had to adjust a bunch of parts to make them fit, also had to finally use some expansion brackets(thanks Jim!) to get the raptor to fit in the 5 1/4 inch bay since it refused to fit in the 3 1/2 incher. 

Once all of the hardware was in place, the only thing left was plugging everything in.  OK.  For some reason, I am not capable of remembering the process of plugging in components, because I always make the mistake at least once, and today was no exception.  I spent a significant amount of time(ie longer than 5 minutes) plugging everything in all at the same time.  What's the problem? Well, when I hit the power button nothing happened, not one f*cking thing.  And the fix? Unplug everything and do it the right way.  Baby steps.  Plug in ONLY the motherboard and power switch and see if that works.  Yep. Then plug in only ONE more component and make sure it still turns on.  Keep doing that until it stops working, and then you'll find out that you effed up the front panel usb connectors which apparently stops the machine from booting.   Grrrrr.  That was an unplanned amount of time to waste on a Sunday.

I figured since I wasted so much time on the shiny new box I'd take a few photos of the innards: